Tom Swift and His 3-D Telejector (6 page)

Tom could hear Quezada chuckle. "I’ll take creds for this one. We were just trying to shake you awake with sound, every wild mix the techs could come up with. So—you blacked out? What about the others aboard—are they okay, too?"

Tom glanced around. His five crewmates were moving groggily. They seemed to be fighting to regain consciousness as if they, too, had been roused by the piercing radio noises. But their heavy-lidded eyes looked ready to close again.

Tom shook himself as he felt the same drowsiness as before dulling his brain. "Over for now, Fearing," he mumbled into the microphone. "Some k-kind of influence is coming from the Orb. We’d b-better clear out of here p-p-pronto!"

Lead-fingered, Tom fumbled at the controls, desperate to set a course back to base. But his eyes widened in disbelief as they focused on the locator-calculator, the Spacelane Brain. "What in the cosmos—!
We’re already starting to loop back!
"

Another bizarre mystery! Had the Orb somehow grabbed hold of the ship? Or had Tom made the changes himself—and forgotten, just as Pete Langley had blanked out his telephone call?

Brain still fogged, the young space captain reversed repelatron thrust and adjusted course. Then he sagged against his seat belt as the
Challenger
veered from its trajectory, now slowing with a 1-G
de
celeration. The Orb had again become a distant speck, but it would be hours before the
Challenger
’s arc began to point them Earthward.

Unknowing, Tom fell back into a semiconscious state. Twenty minutes later the astronaut team began to fully revive—Tom and Bud first, then Hank Sterling, Bennings, Aciema, and finally Chow.

"What did—what did it do to us?" Bud wanted to know.

"Something made us pass out," Tom replied. "We were in a state of induced sleep."

Still heaped on the deck, Chow Winkler gazed up at Aciema Musa, who was nursing a bruise on her arm. "Sorry, ma’am. Didn’t know where I ’as fallin’ to. Does it hurt?"

"No," she replied. "Then again, the feeling hasn’t started coming back."

Tom checked the rest of the crew. All were now fully revived, and injuries from their unexpected collapses seemed minor. "We’re heading back to base," Tom reported to Fearing. "There was an unexplained deviation from trajectory, but I have the ship under control now."

"Not unexplained to me,
Challenger
," came Quezada’s rejoinder. "Call it human muscle power at work!"

"But Amos—how in the world did you get her to start course reversal?"

"Well now, Tom, I’d suggest to take a closer look at your board—and send that question Arv Hanson’s way!"

Over the PER link Arv reported with a laugh, "Oh, I was a clever little engineer. We needed to try slowing you before you went zooming off toward Andromeda, but we couldn’t change the settings on the big repelatrons. And suddenly I remembered the Donkeys."

"The two I launched?" asked Tom—who suddenly remembered that he needed to rendezvous with them to recover whatever samples they had taken from the Orb.

"No, Skipper, the four remaining ones locked in their cradles in the vehicular hangar." Hanson reminded Tom that the new Donkeys had been designed for remote-control operation as needed. "We used the magnifying antenna here at Enterprises to send them a sequence of instructions—basically to swivel their radiators every which way until each one locked onto Venus. I had transmitted the spectronic frequency data; all they needed was to detect a push back."

"And you used that to slow and steer the ship?"

"The position of Venus was approximately right. Four mini-repelatrons against all those big ones, still firin’ away—kind of an unequal tug-of-war."

"A tug-of-war in reverse! But it was enough to make a difference."

Mr. Swift cut in. "Ultimately, we could have forced you into a circle. But it would have taken days."

"It was a great plan," Tom said. "Now I’ll retrieve the two probes—see you tomorrow, back home."

There were further surprises in store. "We can’t find the probes," Hank reported. "I’ve been scanning the general area their programmed trajectories should have taken them to. But there’s nothing there."

"What about the signals from the instruments?"

"Dead silent, Tom."

"Could they have crashed into the Orb?" Bud speculated. "Maybe it’s not as empty inside that glow as you thought!"

Tom didn’t answer his friend, but turned to the control board and made some adjustments. After a moment he said: "We
are
getting some signal. But it’s pulsating rapidly."

"What do you mean?" asked Hank.

"Look at the oscilloscope. A fraction of a second of signal—then a much longer interruption. Aciema, could some sort of MHD effect cause periodic blanking like that?"

"If so, I’m not familiar with it. Still, an electromagnetic interaction could explain why the Donkeys are so far off course."

But the answer was less dramatic—yet strange. "Good night!" gaped Bud as he stared into the depths through the viewport. "Look at ’em go!"

"Spinnin’ like blame space lariats," was Chow’s description.

"Tumbling head over heels," Tom said. "Which is why we couldn’t get a steady signal from them."

Mused Aciema, "I know of nothing that could cause a phenomenon like this, Tom. And you say they’re almost at right angles to their planned trajectories?"

"It’s like they bounced off some kind of force field, don’t you think?" Bud speculated.

Tom grinned at the notion. "You mean something along the lines of, ‘
Raise the shields—enemy Donkeys approaching
’ ?" The young inventor waggled his head. "At the speed they were moving, hitting some kind of barrier wouldn’t have bounced them, it would have smashed them to transistors. It looks to me like they were deflected by a powerful, concentrated force—almost
refracted
, like light through a prism."

"If the force was unequally distributed, it would cause torque," observed Hank. "Rotation or tumbling, in other words."

Careful pushes from the
Challenger
’s repelatrons slowed the tumble of the probes and allowed Tom to regain remote control of their propulsion units. He was finally able to maneuver them into their cradles in the hangar-hold.

The great ship had many hours of outward travel yet ahead as it decelerated, and then the inbound leg of the journey, on which they stayed well away from the Green Orb. There were no further strange incidents, and at last Tom was back in Shopton, in bed. He fell asleep quickly, and his sleep was deep. In the morning he was certain he had dreamed—yet could remember nothing of them.

"Have you any idea what caused you to black out, Tom?" inquired his mother at breakfast.

"Just a guess, Mom, but I’d say there’s something about the Orb’s electromagnetic emanations when it gets ‘agitated’ that induces unconsciousness," Tom said.

"Uh-huh—a self-defense instinct at work!" was Sandy’s quick opinion. "I’ll bet the Jolly Green Orb is a big green space brain!"

"Maybe, sweetheart," said Mr. Swift with a smile. "But there’s no need to take a flying leap toward a science-fiction scenario. A more reasonable hypothesis is that this is a purely natural reaction to the near-approach of energy sources, such as the megascope beams or the slight secondary resonance produced by the linear fields of the repelatrons."

"And there’s nothing mysterious about electromagnetic brain stimulation, Sandy," Tom elaborated. "Brain researchers have found it’s possible to put people to sleep by electrically stimulating the basal forebrain—and doctors have used electrical anesthesia, too."

"Exactly," said Damon Swift. "We ourselves have dealt with it, you know—the pulsator weapon that we confronted when you were developing your jetmarine, son. The protective device you invented then might also protect you from this effect."

"I’m anxious to look over the recordings from the Donkeys," Tom stated, "and whatever their samplers captured. That’ll answer a lot of questions. And then maybe I can get back to work!"

Sandy looked at her older brother in surprise. "Poking around in this Orb thing isn’t
work
?"

"I believe he means his current invention," smiled Damon Swift. "The 3-D telejector."

"And," Tom said abruptly, "it may turn out that the telejector project will be important to the other one—to making scientific sense of the Green Orb!"

"I’M AFRAID I don’t understand, Dear," responded Mrs. Swift. "How could they be connected?"

"It just sort’ve came to me, Mom, all of a sudden," Tom said thoughtfully. "Maybe I’m off base, but...

"We’ve been treating the Orb as a normal solid object—like an asteroid or a gas cloud. Yet after the flyby it looks less like that than ever. I’m wondering if it might be some kind of
light
phenomenon!"

"Some kind of projection?" asked Mr. Swift, puzzled.

"No, not exactly. It still may not be anything deliberate, involving someone’s technology—it could be something purely natural that the universe turns out now and then. But it could have the properties of an image, not an ordinary physical object. If that’s true, the only way to gain detailed data about it might be to use a camera system to capture a full 3-D range of wavefront information—and reproduce it for study in the same form."

"But Tomonomo," Sandy objected, "can you get close enough to take 3-D pictures like that without getting knocked out?"

"I won’t have to, if my idea pans out," was the cryptic reply. Inquiry fell silent. The Swift family respected Tom’s usual wish to let his inner intuitions cook before pouring out their product.

At Enterprises Tom spent time studying the data captured by the Repelatron Donkeys during their interrupted probe—time wasted, as it developed. "Good night," he groaned in Hank Sterling’s direction. "All that effort for
nothing
!"

Hank gave a rueful nod. "Nothing in the sampling reservoirs but a nice vacuum."

"And no recorded readings from the instruments. Whatever affected our consciousness, it wasn’t an electromagnetic pulsation effect after all."

"Well, I guess we do know
one
thing, Tom," the engineer pointed out. "It’s easy to tell exactly when the Donkeys started tumbling, and where they were."

"True. It happened just at the outer fringes of the halo—the part we can detect optically, at any rate. And that’s something."

"Yeah—
really
something!"

Unable to proceed further with the mystery, Tom turned to another. In his electronics lab, he resumed his postponed work with his 3-D telejector. Arvid Hanson’s assistant Linda Ming assisted him. "So Arv’s taking a sick day? Doesn’t happen too often."

"Oh, you know these Swedes," she replied. "Hardy stock. He woke up with a head cold, he said." She took a curious look at the electronics equipment on Tom’s workbench. "But this is the sorta thing that would perk him up, I’ll bet."

"Me too."

Since before the fateful night at the Gullbracken House that seemed to have begun the recent series of peculiar events, the young inventor had been trying to solve some difficult problems with his telejector by exploring a new approach. The experimental version, crudely assembled, took the form of three parallel columns of metal rings, the array mounted as a unit over a swivel-base. "These look like micro-mini versions of your megascope antenna," Linda remarked.

"The new telejector uses some of the principles of the megascope, but in reverse," confirmed the blond-haired youth. "In the megascope, the distant beam terminal registers the light waves passing through it and reproduces the wavefronts at the other end, here on Earth, for viewing on the screen. The notion behind this improved telejector is to create a remote emission-point that
generates
light, replicating the wavefront forms—called Fourier patterns—as a hologram does. As the point sweeps back and forth a thousand times a second, the luminous patterns are ‘painted’ in space, and the eye interprets the output as a three-dimensional image."

"And there’s your 3-D TV program," she nodded. "A floating invisible hologram!"

"By eliminating the need for a cloud of absorptive droplets to act as my screen, the system becomes a great deal more practical for standard use," Tom went on as he labored over a circuit. "But theory is one thing, Linda—practice is another. I need your help on some of the miniaturization angles."

"That’s what I’m paid for, chief." As she assisted him, she asked some further questions. "One thing you haven’t mentioned. Won’t you need some sort of special TV camera to pick up the lightwave information in the first place? The Fourier stuff?"

"Sure will—and it’s already testing out fine. Look."

Tom pointed. For the first time Linda noticed a small box mounted on the lab wall. Attached to the front of the chassis was a vertical cylinder covered like a gemstone with regular facets set at various angles. "I’ve mounted a half-dozen of my holoceivers at different places on the walls. You need inputs from several directions for the system to work."

"Makes sense. They don’t look much like TV cameras."

"They work on a different principle," he explained. "Like the megascope, they use a vector-resolving quantum matrix to ‘read’ the wavefronts. But I don’t extend it out into space. The holoceivers work with the photons that enter the isolator prism—the cylindrical lens, if you want to think of it that way."

Tom and Linda worked for hours to make the new system produce a bright enough output to be visible in normal light. Repeated tests showed exciting progress, realistic 3-D images seeming to float in midair in front of the triple antennas.

Amidst their concerted work, Chow and his lunch cart had been sent away twice. But the third attempt by Tom and Linda was sternly rebuffed. "Not another word!" he huffed. "It’s more’n halfway t’ dinner, an’ you two kin take time fer a simple sandwich an’ some fixins."

Tom smiled and wiped his brow. "Guess you’re right, pardner." He gave Linda Ming a sly nod, and she also smiled. Chow’s visit had been anticipated—and prepared for.

Chow handed off the sandwiches and ladeled out some rich potato salad as well. As he turned and began to clomp off, Linda suddenly called out: